ABSTRACT
The implications of Hegelianism become more apparent in the epigoni, the followers of Hegel. These do not so entirely as the majestic philosopher obscure their heads in the clouds. Smaller and more one-sided men, the magnificent seesaw between thesis and counter-thesis, which justifies all from Francis of Assisi to Maximilien Robespierre, is by them periodically forgotten. Prejudices are permitted to appear. Hegelianism breaks definitely into an Hegelianism of the Right and of the Left. The Hegelianism of the Right, reaching Britain late, had more philosophic influence there than in the German fatherland. Here S. T. Coleridge, the poet, had already, with Southey, “philosophized” the thought of Burke by adding to it notions of Schelling’s and Hege’s. Coleridge indeed, full of dangerous nonsense about “society” as an entity or substance, had brought to a point the issue between two schools of thought when he remarked to the Utilitarian, Harriet Martineau: “But you seem, Miss Martineau, to regard society as just an aggregate of individuals.” “Of course; what else should it be?” For Harriet Martineau, as for Bentham, the individual parent, not the politicians and generals and their State, was the proper guardian of the future. For Coleridge it was a corporative something that was a guardian, a group. The mood of Coleridge was to reappear in America, in an even less defined but generally humanistic fashion, in the writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson. A new writer, even better acquainted with the Germans, was now to attain a popular vogue, if not a profundity, which Coleridge never achieved.
